Karin wrote
I do agree that showing a character's response to
pain is a way of developing the character. The debatable part
is how it is done.
I must say I'm really sympathetic to Karin's
point of view here. I can understand that there may be people
who read noir/hb because they're interested in seeing just
how tough a detective/hero might possibly be, but I can't say
I'm one of them. For me the noir/hb novel is a way of talking
honestly about the human condition, while not forgoing the
pleasures of story.
As a writer I think the hardest things to write
are sex and violence and certain rules pertain to both. For
me their primary purpose is to illuminate character. And when
they fail utterly is when they decide instead to titillate.
Now titillation is in some degree in the eye of the beholder,
but, by and large, I have a pretty good idea as to when I, as
a reader of a scene of sex or violence, am being titillated.
And by and large it's accompanied by the thought 'does anyone
really do that?' In sex scenes the wish fulfilment tends to
be all too obvious (twins, hot tubs, hookers who fall for
detectives) but, with violence, authors tend to be hide
behind the
'it's all true' defence. Frankly I don't believe for a moment
that rapists regularly remove their victims' teeth (you just
have to consider the logistics seriously) and I strongly
suspect that something about the notion of it turns the
author on. And I think the repulsion to which Karin refers is
the repulsion one feels at being confronted with someone's
else's sexual fantasies (without having asked for them).
Torture, it seems to me, is almost always pornographic, once
written down.
Of course I realise that plenty of the appeal of
fifties noir at the time was as a kind of violent
pornography, I kind of hoped though that, here in the
noughties, noir might concern itself with real tensions and
troubles, and not merely provide an outlet for writers to
sublimate their aberrant desires.
There's a line in a Jimmie Dale Gilmore song
about the difference between
'what's real and what pretends'. I think most of this outre
violence is the product of writers pretending. It's certainly
very 'genre', but it's nothing of what makes me love - and,
intermittently, attempt to write - the genre. Because that is
about attempting to deal with what's real, and that involves,
as a writer, trying to transmit something learned from one's
life experiences. If your life experiences involve lots of
fetishistic violence, then you may well write well about it,
if not, please consider the possibility that you won't.
John
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